Surveillance capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff's term for an economic order that claims human experience as raw material for behavioural data, prediction and influence.
ConceptSources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 19 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Definition checked against Wikidata.
- Wikidata, surveillance capitalism
The monetisation of personal information, the sense in which the essay uses it.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) is not catalogued and Zuboff has no Person record, so coined_by and coined_in are left empty.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
The essay uses the term for the advertising systems that know more about a population than any census: the private view from above that governments still struggle to assemble. Related to legibility, which concerns the same question of who can see a population.
In the essays
- Neo-Technocracy: Same Dream, Bigger Budget
Read the essay
Ideas
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/concepts/surveillance-capitalism.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5-5 on 2026-10-19